community band

I like when I can send out feelers of wryness and they are caught. Do you catch the twinkle in my eye? Wink wink nudge back? So much better that than waiting until I say I'M JOKING. So much better to be sitting beside a man fifty years my senior with a clarinet between his knobbled hands and to tease the tubas together and to catch him smiling when the dog barks along with the Star-Spangled Banner than to be smirking down my reed alone. Where I sat in the band before we used to call the 'dell' --the oboes in the dell-- sitting in my chair like the nipple in a breast of flutes. But now the seating has shifted and our curves have straightened, and I'm off to one edge, which is fine, and it's especially fine to be sitting next to a man who might in another life have been my grandfather and if so I would have liked to inherit his easy grin.

400

do you know I've written

four-hundred

of these?(and here's where I am honest and say that this is more or less Selfish (read: they are for me and I'm just letting you watch) just as are the miles of word documents saved on my computer under the heading of me)

if my life had a more fluid narrative I could have written you a library.



I have a lot on my list this week. Work juggle love check family band. I'm trying to be end oriented rather than process oriented to keep my brain from noticing the fuzzy cotton nest it's resting in. I will not have a cold.
I will not have a cold.

spending a Saturday

I had a nightmare last night that there were sharp knives cutting across my skin and I couldn't fast forward quickly enough to the end where I woke up. But then I did, heart racing and uneasy, and I was surprised that it was morning already--that the sun was bright and warm and thirty minutes on the deck made the sweat collect between my breasts and in the crooks of my elbows. Had lunch and tea among floral prints and lace, my knee perpendicular to the knee of the wrong-handed boy I love, completely at ease. And there was soccer this afternoon--pumping my fist and biting my nails. I do get involved. I would. The game ended and I have been draining ever since, the energy and caffeine and clearheadedness seeping away. I felt for a while today that I could speedwalk to my parents' house and back and I almost think I could have, but now I've lost that temptation and all the others that would take me outside or to a public space. I am muzzy and soft and have had too many cookies today, I think. There's part of me that wants nothing more than to cut my day off right now. No more. I'm done. It was good, but I've spent all the day's confidence and am left with not much more than hot eyes and a head drooping to the side. Done. Let's crawl into bed and just see how long until I'm dreaming again.

all that is good

Sometimes I just want to list a cocktail of all that is good. Cheerios. Fame. Sibelius. ESPN.com. Nude naps. Loofahs. Text messaging. Pages and pages of journaling. Leftovers. Hand weights. Heel cream. Diet coke. Indian food. Mexico. My round green coffee mug. Oboe reeds. Spinach. Bill Bryson. The phrase 'fart blossom.' Lover's eyes. The color of my shirt matching the color of the ice cream. Coconut rum. Self confidence. Commitment. Chests. Porch lights. Nalgene bottles. Clean pillowcases. Burt's Bees lipbalm. Cats. Eyelash curlers.
I
could
go
on.

Cricket

There's a small black cat named Cricket who watches for me in the mornings as I walk to work. He sits on the porch of the big brick house on the corner by the mimosa tree and catches my eye and I his and then jumps down to meet me on the sidewalk and winds his way around my ankles and peppers me with chirping meows. I kneel down to tease at the butting parts of his head and his long, whippy tail. I would if I could keep him with me, an ego boost, a reminder of the pleasure in 'oh hey, it's you!!' throughout the rest of my long walk through town.

daughter

There was something about the way I was sitting very still this evening while my chemo-haunted mother fell asleep with her head on my lap that reassured me that I could learn to love someone the way she loves me.

wide eyed

Ever have one of those days when each time you glance in the mirror you seem to have the look about the face of someone who's just removed their glasses? That's me today.

fluttering

I like very much that I work at in an office that lets me run NPR in the background and part two of my thankfulness is in my ability to take a break to talk my brother through the maze of an unfamiliar city from 130 miles away. I've always been able to answer my phone if I want to, and I can't say enough about how that feels.

What I've been up to these past few days is not really a voyage of self discovery, because believe me, I make only a LITTLE more sense to me than I do to you, but more of a continued acceptance of my own anti-linearity. My bursts of emotion and my expansive gestures to fix them in place. I think I'm becoming a person who is ok with driving six hours north to where I grew up and then locking myself in a stall in the bathrooms in the public library and crying for five minutes before I recover myself and walk back out with a bounce in my heels. I have always been the person who does this--I am learning to be ok with admitting it. I am not like the rest of my family in that I react with my stomach, with my heart first. The head comes later, if it comes. The logic may or may not seep in and influence my actions. I guess I'm learning to be ok with that, to be accepting of my own fluttering, and to realize that there just may be a reason and a place for my inappropriate heart bleeds and my ability to get from point A to point B by taking a stopover at point Y for a few hours and then sprinting back.

I have been very soft. Y'all have been making me melt with your low, sweet voice and your brown eyes and the way you let me back into your life for an hour even though I haven't seen you in eight years. I have been turning to mush in the face of an old sheepdog named Blue and the squeak you inserted into your wedding vows and the beautiful fall of the green fabric of your dress. I am internalizing the way you told me I'm beautiful and the heat of your skin under my fingertips. I am a soggy, soggy mess when I try to limit my empathy to the truth, when no matter how tightly I'm hugging you you're not close enough to me and I wish you were even more tightly woven to me.

I'm not magic. I'm not clever. But I feel pretty good.

attached

I get very attached--and I'm not saying this is a bad thing--to curling ribbon, and the way a whole mass of it looks in gold and silver and white spilling across the top of a carefully wrapped gift. I get very attached to jigsaw puzzles, to the pieces of dogwood blossoms taking slow shape above the red barn and striped river under the green sky. I learned this from my mom, and that's why last night we almost stayed up too late together trying to finish the one laid out on the table. It was hard to walk away. I get that from my mom, too. They're not vices, the ribbon and the puzzle pieces. Neither is the attachment I feel to my boyfriend's hillbilly voice or the way warm spring lightning sometimes creates the backdrop to a day. I am attached to the silver ring on my finger made to look like a leafy vine. Am attached to the cool, soft sensation that comes when I stretch my clean legs down along the length of my unmade bed. I'm not ashamed of little public indulgences taking the place of the big private ones I keep closed behind my lips. Much easier to admit to my clinging, velcro personality when under the heading of Addicted To I can start my list with curling ribbon and jigsaw.

I wouldn't change a thing

I don't paint my nails often because I smudge them, I bite them, I dig my thumbnail down in the base of its neighbors while I'm waiting, while I'm telling a lie, while I'm half a mind gone. When I'm do paint them, I'm glad when you notice.

I woke up at midnight and the music from before I'd turned out the light was still playing--the mix cd from the wedding last weekend. Over and over You Light Up My Life.

I hate hate hate--as much anyone would--the feeling of helplessness when I can't take away the pain of someone I love. I want to thrust my fingernails under your skin, being careful not to leave a bruise, and pull out the offending aches and viruses. Wind them up around a spool and throw it in the fire.

I am dumbly trying to reward myself for good behavior with bad. I can walk for hours and stretch out my muscles until the sweat collects in drops all along my chest, down my stomach, running down to my ankles. And then I can crawl up into my bed with a pint of ice cream, and that ache of non-instant gratification dulls. It's a loss, on the whole, but my legs stretch further than they used to. I pull my arms into my side and can watch the muscles underneath my freckled shoulders bunch. I'll learn.

I'm afraid of going home. I mean, the old home. I am almost in tears when I think about the slot I used to slide into that has since closed and healed. I'm going anyway.

I am grateful to have someone to tease me onto the floor and plant a kiss on my forehead. I am grateful to have someone look past all my bumps and blotches and wayward hair and still call me beautiful.

I listened to a recording of a performance I gave five years ago--I stood on center stage backed up by an orchestra and played a concerto. I listened to it three times in a row because the first time listening through didn't go well and the second time I was hanging upside down and the blood was rushing to my face, but then the third time I was careful, and I was thankful that I did that once, and that I have proof. Because at least I can put myself in the shoes of the me who thought that was possible.

Last night I dreamed I was lost in the rain on a bike with tires losing pressure and I couldn't call for help because my cellphone had no service because a couch had been moved in the way. Which is really no crazier--or at least not much crazier--than the actuality of me, with the needing help and refusing to ask for it and the glacial cool that's actually just fear and the mercurial back and forth that makes up my evenings and nights.

I'm healing. I don't think I'll always be so sober. I mean, I think I'll learn to find the joy in it all again. We'll get there at the same time.